


Maybe Something Sad from Long Ago

by Linsky



Category: Ghost Quartet - Malloy
Genre: Gen, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Sisterhood, Violins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 11:46:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17043143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: They moved a lot, the first dozen years of Pearl’s life, following her mother’s photojournalism career.





	Maybe Something Sad from Long Ago

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Synergic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synergic/gifts).



They moved a lot, the first dozen years of Pearl’s life. Egypt, Syria, India, Sudan, following her mother’s photojournalism career, each country a new language and a new color of dust to work its way under Pearl’s clothes. Pearl used to come home from school and lean against whichever surface served as a kitchen table that month to watch her mother clean it off the cameras: each piece lifted carefully out and laid in neat rows; the miracle of the soft cloth that passed over them to make them clean; the black mechanical sprawl reassembled tidily into a working box, ready to shoot again.

Her mother wouldn’t talk to her while she worked on the cameras, but she talked at other times. “Adding beauty to the world is its own job,” she said, chopping vegetables or folding the clothing. “It’s just as important as saving a life.” Pearl’s child brain took it and made it law: she practiced her violin for hours every day until her fingers were cramped and callused, pushing herself for ten or twenty or thirty more minutes, each stroke of the bow another life that wouldn’t be lost that night.

Ruby didn’t enjoy the playing. The two of them almost always had to share a room; the dust affected Ruby’s sinuses and made her snore, and Pearl lay awake some nights until dawn painted the ceiling gray. She added that to the violin’s magic: every stroke scraped away some of Ruby’s snores, and if she played long enough some evening she would finally be able to sleep.

One day when she and Ruby were eight, the village next to theirs was attacked, gunshots and screams ringing through the night while they crouched with their parents under the bed. The next day they learned that over three hundred people had died. Pearl played the violin that night until her fingers could barely move and Ruby started screaming for silence. Later that night, Pearl lay in bed with her fingers aching against her thighs and wondered if it was enough.

They were poor and they were rich. Her parents’ American money stretched to vast quantities of whatever was sold cheapest in the countries they lived in, but her mother was always filling out paperwork for grants, and Pearl and Ruby never got the trendy clothes and toys and skincare products they saw other American girls with on TV. Ruby watched more TV than Pearl, who had to practice, and would throw screaming tantrums when their parents would say that no, she couldn’t get the charm bracelet they were selling in the commercial; it didn’t ship to Algeria.

The charm bracelet showed up that Christmas in a box from their aunt Rachel, one for each of them. Ruby tried to get Pearl to play jeweler with her, but Pearl couldn’t make herself interested for more than one game. She wasn’t good at playing with Ruby in general. She liked it better when Ruby played with her imaginary friends; Ruby always said they were better sisters than her anyway.

***

“I never said that.” Ruby laughs. They’re at lunch at Caulson’s, where they’ve been meeting every few weeks since Ruby came to NYU. They started high school together, after they came back to the States, but Ruby didn’t finish on time. Pearl took advanced placement and was already through the first year of her Master’s at Julliard by the time Ruby started as a freshman.

Ruby’s thinner than the last time Pearl saw her. She’s thinking about changing her major from psychology to something else. The professor she thought was so amazing has turned out to be an asshole. Pearl thinks Ruby mentioned the professor before, but it’s hard to keep track of Ruby’s stories sometimes.

“Are you still dating—” She wants to say Brendan, but that’s not right.

“Brent? Ugh. No.” Ruby makes a disparaging noise. “I don’t know why I ever thought American boys would be so great.” She leans forward over her soda. “How about you? Are you still in touch with Dave?”

Dave was the kind of boy Ruby meant when she talked about American boys, at least the first few years they were back in the States. For two whole years all Pearl heard about was Dave this, Dave that, Dave was going to ask her out any day now, Ruby was sure of it. Something did happen between the two of them junior year of high school; Pearl has never been sure what it was, because Dave never had the full story, and Ruby’s never told her. That was around the time Ruby dropped out of high school for the first time and Pearl knew less about her life anyway. Now Pearl nods, tucking her napkin under her plate: yes, they’re still in touch.

“Tell him I said hi,” Ruby says.

***

Whenever they moved to a new city, Ruby would get out all her things and arrange them around the room. Stuffed animals on the bed; toys and games on the shelves; the tattered poster of the Portland Trail Blazers on the wall—they were the basketball team from the city they were born in, which Ruby became a fan of as soon as she learned that sixty-three percent of Americans followed sports. There were other things, too: jewelry boxes and pretty shells from their trip to the Mediterranean and a paper flower a man had given her on the street one day because she was pretty. It was the same arrangement every time, modified only for different furniture configurations, and it covered every flat surface in the room except for Pearl’s bed.

Pearl didn’t need any surfaces for her things. She found her home in the body of the violin: in the smell of the resin, the rub of the strings under her fingers, the gleam of the light reflecting off the wood. She had special polish she would rub into the body to keep the wood limber that smelled of lemons and fresh rain. When they moved into a new place, Pearl would wait until Ruby was out and spend an hour or so just rubbing the polish into the wood until the whole room smelled like home.

Ruby didn’t like the scent. She thought it was silly that Pearl cared so much for the violin—“It’s not a doll,” she said scornfully. But the violin was better than a doll. You had to pretend if you wanted a doll to do something. Her violin held sounds that were real, sounds that she could coax out and make sing through the night.

Ruby used to complain about that, too: how many hours Pearl spent practicing. “What if something happened to me?” she asked once. “And I screamed and screamed, but no one would even hear over the sound of that violin. You all wouldn’t care anyway, as long as Pearl could keep winning things.”

Pearl had won a prize at the Lvivskyi Virtuoz in Ukraine the previous month. Ruby had spent the next few weeks saying loudly that it didn’t matter how well either of them did at anything, when they weren’t living their _real_ lives in their _real_ country.

This was near the end of their time abroad, when Ruby said things like that more and more often. Their father pulled Pearl aside after the comment about the screaming. “Is there anywhere you can practice at school?” he asked. “I don’t want you to feel like you can’t play here, but—”

Pearl didn’t mind playing at school. It didn’t matter where she was as long as she had the violin. At school she could play for hours and hours, undisturbed, and she didn’t have to hear the things Ruby was saying.

The family was rarely together at home anyway. Their mother was busy more often than not on a shoot, and it was their father who did most of the household chores in between freelance editing projects. Pearl can still remember when they were little, when the night was clear and the area was safe, how the whole family used to go outside and curl up in blankets and look at the stars while their father would tell them stories. But that happened less and less as they got older.

***

“I asked Mom about the woman you’re named after,” Ruby says after their food finally comes.

“She never talks about that.” Just a woman she knew in her twenties. Pearl’s ordered the spinach and the risotto, and she nudges them with the edge of her knife, separating the one from the other and squaring the edges in a way she wouldn’t let herself do if it were someone other than Ruby at the table. She has an audition today; she’s been trying not to think about it.

“No, I got her to tell me more this time,” Ruby says. “And guess what? She _died._ ”

Pearl tucks in a stray piece of rice that wants to wander across the line. “Well, it was a long time ago.”

“No, I mean.” Ruby’s leaning over the table, eager. “She died when Mom met her. That’s how it happened. She fell in front of a train, in the subway, and Mom took her picture.”

A picture before or after the train hit? “That’s what Mom does.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Ruby’s twisting her fork in her salad without looking at it.

It might bother her. Pearl can’t tell if it does or not. Ruby’s looking at her like it should, which makes her think this is one of those instances where her emotions are out of step from what the world expects of her.

“I have something to tell you,” she says, squaring the edges of her napkin.

Ruby’s face doesn’t change much when Pearl tells her she and Dave have moved in together. “Wow,” she says. “At your place?”

“Yes.” It’s an apartment on the fifth floor of a beautiful brownstone, in a neighborhood Dave’s parents are nervous about and Pearl’s are not.

“Just wondering if I have to help you move,” Ruby says. “You only have one bedroom, right?”

“We only need one,” Pearl says.

“Yeah. Yeah. Of course.” Ruby’s looking over Pearl’s shoulder at the counter. “I guess I didn’t realize you guys were—so serious.”

They don’t talk about it a lot. Pearl wasn’t the one to tell Ruby they were together in the first place, but she knows her parents have said something. She remembers the way Ruby avoided her gaze when she came home that Christmas. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

“I should go soon,” Pearl says. “I have an audition this afternoon.”

“I’m thinking of transferring,” Ruby says abruptly.

“What? Where?”

“I’m not sure. Middlebury. Bowdoin. Somewhere in New England.”

Pearl’s never heard her talk about those schools before. Ruby was always the one who wanted to stay in one place growing up, who wished they’d go back to the U.S. for good so she wouldn’t have to keep packing and moving. “Okay. Have you decided when—”

“Does he like it when you play?” Ruby interrupts.

“What? Dave?” Pearl’s lost the thread of the conversation. “Of course.”

“Right. Sorry,” Ruby says.

“I should go,” Pearl says. She’s still deciding which piece to play; she needs to make sure her resin is in her case. “I have that—”

“Audition,” Ruby finishes. She’s staring over at the counter again. “I’m sure you’ll do great. You always do.”

***

Pearl runs errands before the audition, to the music store for new resin, to the dry cleaner’s for her concert black. The dry cleaner’s is near her apartment; she thinks about going back to get her old violin, the one that followed her across four continents, even though she decided this morning to bring one of her newer ones. The conversation with Ruby is making her think about it. It’s in good condition—she still pulls it out at night sometimes when she can’t sleep, when she wants to slip through time.

She decides that she doesn’t want to risk being late and goes down into the subway instead. Standing on the platform makes Ruby’s words come back to her, and she tries to picture it: her mother, standing on a platform like this one as a woman falls. The train going by and leaving the tracks different colors than before. The camera going up.

She looks too long, and it turns into something else: their house in Portland, her junior year of high school, a growing pool of red on the bathroom tile. Her mother telling her not to look. The clipped words of the paramedics. She turns away.

Her phone rings twice just before the train is due to arrive. She doesn’t answer the first time—a number she doesn’t know—but the second time it’s Dave. “Did you invite your sister over?” he asks.

Apparently the super called him, a story about a disturbance in the apartment and someone claiming to be Pearl’s sister who followed a neighbor through the front door. “It’s probably nothing,” Dave says. “Go to your audition; I’ll check it out when I get home from lab.”

“All right,” Pearl says.

The train thunders into the station. Pearl needs to catch this train if she’s going to be on time. She watches the doors open, the people pouring off and on, and then she turns around to join the ones going up the steps to the street.

It’s four blocks to the apartment. Pearl makes it in under five minutes. The apartment door is open; she can see right into their living room, its walls lined with musical instruments. There’s one missing: the oldest, that first violin that Pearl almost came back for. Instead there is a spray of wood, splinters scattered across the floor, a tangle of curling strings and smashed plastic chin rest. In the center of the destruction sits Ruby, and in her hand there is a blade.

Pearl’s dry cleaning drops to the floor.

She saw more than her mother wanted her to last time. She remembers the blood, before she was pushed away: a bright spray of it, spreading thickly around Ruby’s outstretched arm. She never asked how Ruby did it. She never talked to Ruby about it at all. She was gone a lot that year, on auditions.

There’s no blood on her floor now. When Ruby raises her head, tears are dripping down her face, onto her arms, her hands: clear, not red. The blade in her hand is still clean. “ _Help_ me,” she says.

Pearl rushes to her.


End file.
